Strange Fruits...

...with apologies to Langston Hughes.

One of the highlights of hiking in the Colca Canyon was trying crazy, wild fruits.

Tuna, aka prickly pear fruit. It was all over the place. The cacti aren't the evilest in the forest, but the fruits have barbs so care (or gloves) are required to pick and peel them. They come in a range of colors and flavors. The red ones seemed sweeter and juicier, the white ones with creamier flesh. All types are full of numerous edible seeds. Excellent chilled on a hot day.


Pitaya agria (Corryocatus brevistylus), or locally called something like mosqui. Some Peruvian websites also call it sanky. Tastes a little like the love child of a kiwi and lemon. Grows on tower-shaped cacti.



We can't figure out what this guy is called, but one of its nicknames is supposedly plátano del la sierra. Grows on squat trees with big, thick trunks and huge leafs. The trees are highly heterozygous, like apple trees apparently. Some of the trees yield sweet fruits, while others yield picante fruits, which are not eaten. You gotta be a local to know which trees yield which fruit, since there is no way to tell by looking at them. See also here.

The fruit has a very gummy flesh and is full of edible seeds. It has a rather disagreeable texture if chewed, but is pretty tasty if you slurp it like a raw oyster. It tastes like a combination of cucumber and banana.

From Strange Fruits

Not a fruit, but delicious-ass crepes in from The Crepería in Arequipa. I could eat these forever.

The Guata's Prayer

Our guata, who art inside us,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy digestion come,
Thy excretion be done,
in Bolivia as it was in Chile.
Consume this, our daily bread,
and forgive us our street food,
as we forgive you for making us poop our pants.
Lead us not into nausea,
but deliver us from gastroenteritis.
For thine is the paristalsis, the microvilli and the chyme,
for ever and ever,
Amen.

Filler

We were hoping to catch the return boat back to Ushuaia the morning after finishing the trek, but due to some problems with what were told was government papers and permission to sail between Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, our boat back to Argentina was delayed indefinately. We spent a few days bumming around Puerto Williams, waiting for papers and boats...read alot of books, played some chess, cooked with what good vegetables we could find, had some good conversations with other travelers, and took naps by the fire at the hostel. We made it back to Ushuaia, and we are currently on a bus back up north to see the mighty Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre. We will be out of communication for a few days.


A few pictures in the meantime...


Manning up to the Manjar jar.

From Dientes

View from Puerto Williams.

From Dientes

I´m too sexy for this shirt, too sexy for these gafas del sol...

From Dientes

I used to like chess. Playing with someone who takes 20 minutes between each move cured me of that. I have alot of pictures of a chess board from one game.

From Dientes

Buenos Aires, part I

We arrived after an uneventful, but exhausting flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires. Instantly assuming cheap-bastard mode, we noted that a shuttle bus to the centro would set us back US$15 per person, whereas an adventure by municipal bus would cost us only 60 cents. After a nearly two-hour tour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires, we finally arrived at the hostel, pleased with our ingenuity and thrift, and nearly hallucinating due to jetlag and sleep deprivation. Fortunately, the hostel came with beds for sleeping, which we did.

Later that day, we ventured out for a walk. We passed by the Plaza San Martin.


Many Argentine flags, taken from the plaza de mayo. This plaza was made famous by the mothers of the desaparecidos who continue to march with photos of their lost sons, daughters and husbands. There was also a small demonstration about the Falkland Islands, which a vocal subset of Argentinians still see as part of their homeland.


We visited the cemetary in Recoleta. There´s no more room there now, but for many years members of high society were enterred there. It´s like a miniture city, with wider avenues in places as well as smaller "side streets." A small contigency of cats keep company with the dead.






Later that day we visited Palermo, which has a botanical garden (also replete with cats!) It was a very pleasant place to lounge. I had asked Erin if she thought that anyone ever brought food for the cats, since we had seen people feeding the hordes of diseased pidgeons in the plazas and it seemed unfair that the healthy-looking cats should go without. No sooner had the words escaped when I saw a couple of women with bags of cat food and a cloud of cats. They turned out to be ex-pat Americans living in Buenos Aires.
Later that night we made a grave error. As most know, Argentina is famous for its beef. You can visit a parrilla and eat a dangerous amount of beef for US$7-8. We knew that we had to visit one eventually if we were to have said to have been to Argentina. We went out at a appropriately slovenly hour with no specific plans to subject ourselves to beef poisoning that night. However, we settled on a restaurant with a very reasonable parrillada and next thing we knew, this pile of flesh was before us. Don't get me wrong; it was delicious. It sat, however like so many kilos of delicious, grilled lead in the stomach for 12-18 hours afterwards. And we didn't even come close to finishing the whole mountain.